DIY Driftwood Centerpiece Featuring Sugru

December 5, 2010

Back when I was searching for my house, I was drawn to homes near bodies of water – Rochester itself is situated between Lake Ontario, and the Finger Lake region (so pretty, and so worth a vacationing at if you’re not from around here!). Some of the homes I checked out were in the City of Canandaigua, right on Canandaigua Lake. Others (and my eventual home) were around Lake Ontario. I attribute my desire to be near a body of water to growing up on Lake Erie (where my fam still lives); I worked at a marina, collected driftwood, collected beach glass, had sandy shoes.

Anyways, I’m off topic. Appreciating the beach access to Lake Ontario that I have now, I’ve spent many an afternoon combing the beach with the dog. One day this summer, while Cody was rolling in dead fish, and I was stuffing perfect beach glass into my pockets, Pete found a stunning piece of driftwood that had cool centerpiece potential – so we decided to give it a try. Here’s what we did (using one of our favorite products, and possibly the most DIY handy products, Sugru):

1. Dried out the wood on the deck for a few days, carefully brushing the sand from all of the creases in the wood.

2. It has an uneven bottom, so we needed to balance it out. By setting it right side-up on a table, we figured out the best location for “feet”.

3. Sugru, right out of the package, is a malleable silicone, so what we did was sculpted and attached black Sugru feet to the base of the wood (and then flipped it over again onto a piece of wax paper to slightly squish each foot so it would sit stable on the table once the feet had dried out).

4. Dried it, feet up, for 24 hours.

5. Twa-la! Set upright, the new driftwood centerpiece legs are solid and strong and will keep the wood balanced off of the table surface (preventing additional scratches on my table surface!)